"In the reconciliation bill, Texas entered $85 million to move the space shuttle from the National Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, Virginia, to Texas. Eighty-five million dollars sounds like a lot of money, but it is not nearly what's necessary for this to be accomplished," Durbin said.

Citing research by NASA and the Smithsonian, Durbin said that the total was closer to $305 million and that did not include the estimated $178 million needed to build a facility to house and display Discovery once in Houston.

Furthermore, it was unclear if Congress even has the right to remove an artifact, let alone a space shuttle, from the Smithsonian's collection. The Washington, DC, institution, which serves as a trust instrumentality of the US, maintains that it owns Discovery. The paperwork signed by NASA in 2012 transferred "all rights, interest, title, and ownership" for the spacecraft to the Smithsonian.

Axon's Draft One debuted last summer at a police department in Colorado, instantly raising questions about the feared negative impacts of AI-written police reports on the criminal justice system. The tool relies on a ChatGPT variant to generate police reports based on body camera audio, which cops are then supposed to edit to correct any mistakes, assess the AI outputs for biases, or add key context.

But the EFF found that the tech "seems designed to stymie any attempts at auditing, transparency, and accountability." Cops don't have to disclose when AI is used in every department, and Draft One does not save drafts or retain a record showing which parts of reports are AI-generated. Departments also don't retain different versions of drafts, making it difficult to assess how one version of an AI report might compare to another to help the public determine if the technology is "junk," the EFF said. That raises the question, the EFF suggested, "Why wouldn't an agency want to maintain a r

The Trump administration has given contracts to four defense contractors that Vice President JD Vance has a financial stake in, according to a report by the government watchdog group Accountable.US.

Financial disclosure forms published by the Office of Government Ethics for June 2025 reveal that through at least the end of 2024—the last date at which he was required to disclose his investments—Vance had anywhere from $100,000 to $250,000 invested in Revolution's Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, a Washington, D.C.-based venture capital group he helped to found before taking office.

A Texas firefighter asked if emergency flood alerts could be sent to Kerr County residents about an hour before the first warnings were received, audio reveals.

In the recording, obtained by US outlets, the firefighter asks at 04:22 on 4 July if a CodeRED alert can be issued. The dispatcher says a supervisor needs to approve the request.

Some residents received the alert an hour later - for others it took up to six hours, according to reports. Asked about the delays, Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said officials were putting together a timeline.

Days after the investigation came out, the state of Alaska announced it would help prosecute city cases to avoid speedy-trial dismissals.

But those state prosecutors are no longer needed. According to the city, the municipal prosecutor’s office now has a full staff of 12 “frontline” prosecutors who take cases to trial, plus a supervisor and an attorney who files motions and appeals. The only vacancy, they said, is a supervisory role: deputy municipal prosecutor.

That amounts to a vacancy rate of about 7% in the prosecutor’s office. In contrast, more than 40% of city prosecutor positions were vacant as of mid-2024, according to a city spokesperson.

The Department of Health and Human Services is cutting undocumented immigrants' access to several health care programs.

The move could potentially affect tens of millions of people each year. Undocumented immigrants will no longer have access to Head Start or the Community Health Center program. Head Start provides education and health care assistance to children.

The change alters a three-decade interpretation of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), issued during the Clinton administration.

She believes the construction of the centre, which is owned by Meta (the parent company of Facebook), disrupted her private well, causing an excessive build-up of sediment. Ms Morris now hauls water in buckets to flush her toilet.

She says she had to fix the plumbing in her kitchen to restore water pressure. But the water that comes of the tap still has residue in it.

"I'm afraid to drink the water, but I still cook with it, and brush my teeth with it," says Morris. "Am I worried about it? Yes."

Meta, however, says the two aren't connected.

Many centres use evaporative cooling systems, where water absorbs heat and evaporates - similar to how sweat wicks away heat from our bodies. On hot days, a single facility can use millions of gallons.

One study estimates that AI-driven data centres could consume 1.7 trillion gallons of water globally by 2027.

Still, the numbers add up. A single AI query - for example, a request to ChatGPT - can use about as much water as a small bottle you'd

Attorney Phillip Arroyo said his client, whom he isn’t identifying out of fear of retaliation, arrived in the United States from Mexico when he was a minor.

The man, now in his early 30s, has legal status through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, according to the attorney. Arroyo said his client was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after a “misunderstanding” during a traffic stop.

He was sent to Alligator Alcatraz on Friday and remains at the facility, Arroyo said. Considering his client’s legal status, Arroyo told the Herald he’s confident he will be able to get an immigration bond.

“The narrative is that only violent criminals are being sent to Alligator Alcatraz,” Arroyo said. “We don’t know why [he was sent there] because he has legal status.”

A federal judge in New Hampshire blocked Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, certifying the case as a nationwide class action.

The decision from U.S. District judge Joseph Laplante comes after the US supreme court said federal judges could only issue nationwide injunctions if they certified plaintiffs as a nationwide class. The issue is expected to return to the US supreme court, which has not yet decided on the constitutionality of Trump’s order.

A staffer from the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, recently got high-level access to view and change the contents of a payments system that controls tens of billions of dollars in government payments and loans to farmers and ranchers across the United States, according to internal access logs reviewed by NPR.

"When we talk about farm loan application records, there is no more personal information anywhere than in that database," Scott Marlow, a former senior official in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, told NPR. "The farmer's entire financial life and the life of their kids and their family, every time they've missed a payment, every time they've had a hard time, every time they've gotten in financial trouble … it's there."

Note: If it's red, it's towards the negative number and means it's underwater.

At least two regional Planned Parenthood affiliates have notices on their websites telling patients that, thanks to a provision in Republicans’ new tax-and-spending bill that “defunds” the reproductive healthcare giant, they can no longer accept Medicaid.

However, this provision – which abortion rights supporters have called a “backdoor abortion ban” – was recently blocked by a court order. Other Planned Parenthood affiliates are continuing to treat patients who use Medicaid to pay for treatment.

Edit: The bill was blocked by a court order but some have a website announcement saying it won't take medicaid.

In its 20 years of existence, the program’s funding has grown fortyfold — reaching $100 million a year starting Sept. 1 — making it the most heavily funded effort of its kind in the country.

Under new rules set to take effect then, the organizations in the program must now document all of their expenses, and they will be reimbursed only for costs tied to services approved by the state. And they cannot seek reimbursement when they redistribute donated items, an effort to prevent taxpayer money from going to organizations for goods they got for free.

Meanwhile, Texas is opening administration of the program to a competitive selection process instead of automatically renewing agreements with contractors, including one contractor that has overseen most of the program for nearly two decades.

The move upends a 70-year-old interpretation of the U.S. tax code, whose Johnson Amendment has barred certain non-profit groups, including churches, from endorsing political candidates without putting their tax-exempt status in jeopardy.

President Donald Trump has long called for Johnson Amendment to be repealed.

“Communications from a house of worship to its congregation in connection with religious services through its usual channels of communication on matters of faith do not run afoul of the Johnson Amendment as properly interpreted,” the IRS said in the joint filing Monday with the National Religious Broadcasters group in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.

The calls from Alligator Alcatraz’s first detainees brought distressing news: Toilets that didn’t flush. Temperatures that went from freezing to sweltering. A hospital visit. Giant bugs. And little or no access to showers or toothbrushes, much less confidential calls with attorneys.

The stories, relayed to the Miami Herald by the wives of detainees housed in Florida’s makeshift detention center for migrants in the Everglades, offer the first snapshots of the conditions inside the newly opened facility, which began accepting detainees on July 2. They reveal detainees who are frightened not just about being deported, but also about how they are being treated by the government, which is saying little about what is taking place inside.

“Why would we treat a human like that?” a woman whose Venezuelan husband is housed in Alligator Alcatraz told the Miami Herald. “They come here for a better life. I don’t understand. We are supposed to be the greatest nation under God, but we forget that

TSA is unveiling new procedures to allow passengers to keep their shoes on at standard airport screening checkpoints, people familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal.

The big change hasn’t been officially announced.

“TSA and DHS are always exploring new and innovative ways to enhance the passenger experience and our strong security posture. Any potential updates to our security process will be issued through official channels,” the agency told the Journal in a statement.

The video released by DOJ, from inside the Metropolitan Correctional Center, begins at 7:30 p.m. on August 9, 2019 and ends at 6:40 a.m. on August 10. Epstein was found dead in his cell on August 10 around 6:30 a.m. The missing minute from the video occurs on the night of August 9 where the tape seems to jump from 11:58:58 p.m. to 12:00:00 a.m.

The full video released by DOJ is almost 11 hours long, but we’ve clipped the missing portion below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoG2NXW5IxU

Many people on social media have questioned why the doors in the video are different from the photos aired in 2019 by 60 Minutes that show police tape covering Epstein’s cell. A door with a window is seen, whereas the visible doors in the video that was released by the DOJ don’t feature any windows.

It’s also notable that DOJ released two versions of the video. The first is apparently untouched, though you can’t make out Epstein in either. The second was altered slightly by the FBI. As the DOJ put i

In a surprising and possibly unlawful act, five state legislators were denied entry Thursday into a taxpayer-funded migrant detention center deep in the Everglades, raising questions about what will happen behind the razor-wire fences that are being erected surrounding the controversial facility the state has named Alligator Alcatraz.

Armed only with state law and a growing list of humanitarian concerns, state Senators Shevrin Jones and Carlos Guillermo Smith, along with Representatives Anna V. Eskamani, Angie Nixon and Michele Rayner, arrived at the gates of the facility to conduct what they saw as a legally authorized inspection.

What they encountered instead was silence, locked doors and a bureaucratic wall. The state’s shifting justification for not letting them in — first a flat denial, then vague “safety concerns” — only fueled suspicions.

In his all-out war on illegal immigration, President Donald Trump has branded immigrants as “criminals,” “invaders” and “predators,” as his administration targets millions of Haitians, Latin Americans, gang members and foreign college students for deportation.

Now, the president has directed the Justice Department to bolster its resources in a major crackdown on naturalized citizens suspected of unlawfully obtaining their U.S. citizenship.

According to a recent memo, the department plans to focus not only on individuals who may have lied about a crime or having done something illegal during the naturalization process. But authorities also plan to focus on others who may have committed a crime after becoming citizens — a generally untested legal frontier.

Between when President Donald Trump returned to office in January and June 10, 1,355 people in Colorado have faced administrative arrest by federal immigration authorities, according to data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that was obtained by a team at the University of California, Berkeley. That’s a nearly 300% increase from the same period in 2024, when 342 people were arrested in the state, according to The Denver Post’s analysis of the data.

The arrests in Colorado this year amount to more than 9 per day, on average, since Jan. 20.

A majority of those arrested in Colorado had not been convicted of a crime, according to the data. About 40% were listed as having a prior criminal conviction and 30% had charges pending. The remaining 30% were listed only as "other immigration violator."

That proportion has grown: During Trump's first 70 days in office, about 44% of arrestees had been convicted of a crime. Over the next 70 days, that number dropped to 36%.

No informat